That is interesting. I tend to pick characters with different feature sets. Peach was great in Super Mario 2 for reaching secrets that required her floating ability. My character choice extends to other games. I don’t believe I’ve ever run a cup in Mario Kart with Mario. For example, my player of choice in Mario Kart 8 is Rosalina. She’s considered part of the heavy Kart class, and as such has slower acceleration but higher top speed. She is harder to control for a novice, but if you do control her well she reaches and maintains higer speeds which gives you an edge. Plus she drifts like a boss! Characters like Rosalina or other heavy racers have a trade-off. If you have trouble maintaining a constant speed via drifting, you will fare poorly. But if you handle the kart well you are at an advantage. Mario doesn’t have that compromise or trade-off, so no matter how skilled you become you’ll never make record track time.
This surprises me. Not about multiplayer platformers in general, but about Super Mario 3D World. I say that because of how well Nintendo designed Super Mario 3D Land and World. The game has organic level progression. World 1-1 will teach you a mechanic, World 1-2 will allow you to practice that mechanic, World 1-3 will add a new dimension, and World 1-4 will combine everything and rely on what you learned in the previous three levels. It is brilliant because you don’t recognize that you are learning as you progress. I compare this to something like LittleBigPlanet. I love that game dearly, but it isn’t actually multiplayer friendly. May partner and I have played both that and Super Mario 3D World. LittleBigPlanet is somewhat unfriendly to players at different skill levels. It punishes players that might have less platforming experience. And they often feel left out and behind. We enjoyed Super Mario 3D World much more because despite the fact that the game has decent challenges, it never makes the players feel imbalanced. It handles co-operation far better. In LittleBigPlanet my partner often felt there was nothing for her character to do. In Super Mario 3D World we constantly felt like we relied on each other. Sometimes I’d get something right, sometimes she would. We were bouncing off each-other and solving things as a team. We saved each other’s bacon about equally. Nintendo got something very right with the multiplayer in this game. So while my experience matches your s for most co-op platformers, it doesn’t for Super Mario 3D World.
Now that’s not to invalidate your experience. It’s a shame that Super Mario 3D World was not the one that made multiplayer platforming click for them.
It kind of is, to be fair. A brilliant evolution, but an evolution nonetheless. I remember playing Super Mario World for the first time at someone else’s home. I immediately wanted the game, but I didn’t receive a SNES until later. So, while I waited for my eventual SNES (that I wasn’t sure I was going to receive) I played SMB3, because they were, in many ways, similar. Even as a kid I recognized that Nintendo took SMB3 and built on it to create Mario World.
The key difference however was the level and world design. SMB3, and the previous two games, actively encouraged skipping parts of the game. Mario World did the opposite. It encouraged you to find all the secrets. While I think that desire remains intact in Mario 64 to Galaxy, I don’t think it is ever done as well as Mario World, and the reason again is fatigue. At some point in Mario 64, 100 stars, instead of the full 120 stars, is enough. You’ve done enough. At least I am. I don’t feel rewarded enough to track down all 120 stars. Whereas I feel the opposite in Mario World. I want every alternative route. I want to complete the brutal platforming sections of star road and transform the entire world, koopa troopas included. Maybe that’s just me and I am applying personal enjoyment to the general design of the game with broad strokes.
All that is to say that I do love Mario 64 and Galaxy. And Mario 64 blew me away. It was one of my favourite games of that era. I still remember buying the N64 at Toys R Us when I was a teenager. I have fond memories of that game. The crucial point is that two decades later I look back and say “Mario 64 was a transformative and pioneering game that I loved, while Super Mario World was an evolutionary and iterative game that I love, and want to play again right now”.
So I did experience a significant whoa moment with Mario 64, and the game has stuck with me as an important one. But I guess it is matched by the moment I first played Mario World. That first moment wasn’t a woah one, it was something deeper. With Mario 64 I felt like this was something that have never been done before. With Mario World, I had no such feeling. It’s wasn’t brand new. It was just better than anything before it. It was not mind blowing. Rather it was revelatory. I realized that Mario had all that potential that was just waiting to be unlocked, and here it was. And that slightly subtler first impression laid the foundation for a love for the game that the wow factor of 3D simply didn’t do for me on the N64. The wow feeling was fleeting, while the subtler recognition of greatness that came with playing Super Mario World for the first time has lingered without ever diminishing.
I’ll finish by saying that I don’t agree fully that I don’t have an attachment to the 64 tradition of Mario games. I do fondly love Mario 64, and Galaxy is an absolutely superb game that I didn’t play until I bought a Wii U, but love nonetheless. I think a more apt description is that I simply love Super Mario World a little bit more than Mario 64. To get really cheesy on you I’d say that while Mario 64 touched my heart, Super Mario World seeped into my soul